A night of weird, nightmarish pop. Under-12s enjoyed it – The Irish Times

Melanie Martinez

3Arena, Dublin

★★★★☆

There aren’t many true eccentrics left in music, so kudos to former Voice USA contestant Melanie Martinez for bringing the weird back to pop. The opening night of the singer’s European tour unfolds as an avalanche of unnerving imagery and nightmarish costumes spill out as if Hieronymus Bosch were playing Teletubbies or Greta Gerwig’s Barbie were a horror movie version.

This mesmerizing concert is a step through the looking glass into a ghostly playroom that hits you like you’ve eaten too many gummy bears at once. Glittering fairy wings, nightmarish playground games and a wheeled hospital bed that dancers strap the 29-year-old New Yorker into are just a few of the highlights. The two-hour concert also borrows a trick from Taylor Swift’s Eras tour with back-to-back performances of Martinez’s three studio albums, records linked by eye-watering extravagance.

On The Voice, Martinez always sang with a huge, childlike bun on her head. It was an evocation of childhood that was eerily similar when paired with her contrasting black and blonde hair, à la Cruella de Vil (today the look is black and strawberry red).

So it’s very telling that this kind of imagery has found its audience in actual children. The 3Arena’s seating section is packed with kids under 12 staying up way too late for school. Much like every tween’s favorite franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s, something about Martinez’s trick-or-treating vibe seems to affect kids, drawn perhaps by the hint of adult danger that shines around his work. Or maybe they just like all the weird fashion choices and candy cane tunes. It would take a child psychologist to unravel it all.

Martinez doesn’t skimp on the hits. She opens with the title track from her 2016 debut, Crybaby, a project she has described as a “fairytale version of herself.” She then dives into Sippy Cup and Playdate, songs set in some kind of hellish nursery school. Forget Lady Gaga: This is Lady GooGooGaaGaa.

Next, there’s an interlude in which her dancers frolic and the stage is flooded with dry ice. Martinez returns, sitting on a bus and then on an oversized seesaw to listen to a selection from her album K-12 (K-12 is the American equivalent of elementary school). Her voice is clear and high-pitched, and her music has something of the gothic-pop veneer of mainstream artists like Billie Eilish or Lorde. But her evocation of school-age passage rites is decidedly surreal, as if the singer were regressing to a version of her childhood in a fairground mirror.

The performance takes centre stage in the final third. Martínez delves into Portals, his “reboot” LP, which broke a five-year silence and revolves around the idea of ​​resurrection (it was a worldwide hit, reaching number three in the Irish charts).

In the segment, Martinez appears wearing a prosthetic mask that makes her look like Simon Cowell’s idea of ​​Dobby the elf from Harry Potter. But the costume doesn’t obscure her beautiful voice on Battle of the Larynx, a song accompanied by jets of fire that draws on the conflict in her personal life.

Confetti fills the room as she encores the quirky power ballad Womb. As colours swirl and flash, she addresses the crowd for the first time. She thanks her fans for coming and asks them to join in shouting “Free Palestine” on the count of three. It’s a dash of politics at the end of a night that’s brimming with great pop moments and has the eerie quality of a nursery rhyme whispered by a monster under your bed.